Do You Know Your 1,000th Wine Club Member?
Image Credit: James Qualtrough
You know your top customers. You know the ones who call the tasting room by first name, who buy the library releases, who bring their friends.
But if you've got 3,000 members, do you know the 1,000th? The 100th? The 1,101st? Do you know their trends?
That question came up in a recent XChateau podcast conversation with two Enolytics customers — Jesse Lange of Lange Estate Winery in Oregon's Dundee Hills, and Mark Evans of Triumph Advisors, who serves as fractional CEO for two wineries.
It's Mark's answer to the skeptic who says, "I've been running this business for 25 years, I know it instinctively."
And they do. That's the thing. Instinct built this industry. It just doesn't scale past the customers you can hold in your head.
Here are three ideas from that XChateau conversation worth stealing.
Move from reactive to intentional.
Mark's phrase for the old way was "feel-good information" — reports you look at, nod along with, and file away. The shift happens when the information tells you to do something. His example: the at-risk customer report. Knowing in advance who's waning in frequency or spend means you're having a retention conversation, not a win-back conversation. Those are two very different phone calls.
Let your data skewer your orthodoxy.
Jesse said something we haven't stopped thinking about: he's not always sure gut instinct is the most responsive tool for analysis. He uses Enolytics to plan market trips and target varietals and SKUs by region — and he values the data that contradicts his preconceived ideas at least as much as the data that confirms them. Being able to isolate one concept and look at it from several angles is what changed his planning process.
The ROI math is smaller than you think.
Mark doesn't build a case around transformation. He builds it around one campaign. Segment down to the 100 customers who bought your Syrah instead of pounding away at your whole list. If that program delivers $5,000 or $10,000, there's your return — in one fell swoop.
His bottom line, on whether he'd take an engagement with a winery unwilling to work this way: I'm blind without it.
Mark and Jesse’s shared advice for anyone who knows they need to get better at data and doesn't know where to start?
Get peer-reviewed software. Allocate real time to learn it. And make sure your mapping is done correctly.
We've all got room to grow. If you aren't already using Enolytics to the extent that Mark and Jesse are, please be in touch. We want to see you succeed, too.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
Cathy and Chris (and Robin too)